[This
article originally appeared in New Dimensions magazine in April 1990,
shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.]

In the
international battle of wills between the Soviets and America, there was
a problem. America is not one person with a singular resolve. It is millions
of people, and as in any country, some of them are weak—living their
lives in com¬plete submission to willful parents, employers, spouses,
never really finding their identity. It is here that the Soviet propaganda
machine scored some victories.

With
the help of the hysterical press, the Cold War difficulties caused some
casualties on our side. We have a kind of Trojan Horse in our midst as
a result. The Soviet leadership counted on fear and ter¬ror—the
Stockholm Syndrome—to implant socialist sympathies in the hearts
of Americans for their cause.

Patricia
Hearst's "conversion" was a case of the "Stockholm Syndrome."

The
"Stockholm Syndrome" is a phenomenon in which a set of positive
feelings develops between the captive and the captor. It is named after
the 1974 incident in Stockholm, where two men held four captives in a
bank vault for five days. Later, the ex-hostages sided with their captors,
and two women hostages even became en¬gaged to their former captors.

According
to psychiatrists, the sympathy results from the mental trauma of being
held unharmed but helpless. "Once a hostage really believes his life
is in jeopardy, then for each moment that he's not killed, he feels a
great and irrational gratitude to the hostage taker," said Dr. Charles
Bahn of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"The
hostage is suddenly placed in an infantile situation," explained
psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, expert on hostage psychology and Director
of Michigan's Department of Mental Health, specializing in the psychology
of terrorism. "The hostage literally can't eat, can't move, can't
use the toilet facilities, sometimes can't even talk, without permission.
This is demeaning and frightening—throwing a person back to a set
of emotions that are very primitive. These same infantile emotions are
also the precursor to affection and love. It's what a one-year-old infant
would feel toward a parent who, as the powerful being, takes away the
terror of infancy. Hostages don't recognize that their feelings are primitive.
They usually describe their emotions in adult terms such as trust, compassion,
or love .... In the Stockholm Syndrome, part of the reason why terrorists
reciprocate positive feelings toward hostages is that they themselves
are in danger and depend on their hostages for safety."

Dr.
Ochberg, who served as a consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and the Secret Service, points out that once the hostage situation has
been resolved, it may take a while for the hostages to recover from the
syndrome: "[T]he hostage can continue to have strong positive feeling
about the hostage taker after captivity, and these emotions can color
their interpretation of the terrorists' cause. This sympathetic feeling
will eventually go away, ... [I]t's something primitive that is difficult
to shake with reason." He adds that "[h]ostages don't make good
witnesses for the prose¬cution."

During
the Cold War, Soviet leadership counted on fear and ter¬ror—the
Stockholm Syndrome—to implant socialist sympathies in the hearts
of Americans for their cause. Americans, who felt helpless before their
dark fears of impending doom, started to look to the Soviets for relief
from this fear. To some extent Reagan slowed this process in the two key
ways suggested in Part I of this article—strong defense and values.
Knowing what we stood for helped us stand against tyranny, and with SDI,
for the first time it seemed like there was an alternative to living in
fear. But both of these things were made light of by the liberal media
who considered SDI a "star wars" fantasy and American values
somewhat corny—like Reagan himself. So with certain Americans, the
Soviets still enjoyed considerable success.

Watching
angry "peace" demonstrations must cause most Americans to scratch
their heads in wonder. Nothing America does seems to satisfy these people.
Jeane Kirkpatrick described them as people who "blame America first."
What's really going on is straightforward enough; living with fear and
resentment, many Americans were going through what Patty Hearst experienced—a
conversion. Forty years or so of intimidation have transformed the thinking,
feeling, emotional lives of these Americans. Through fear, rage, and intimidation,
they have developed a subconscious affinity with the other side.

The
technique is simple enough. Place a person under extreme pressure. Threaten
his or her life over a long period of time without rest, and just as you
see the terror transforming the victim, change the face of cruelty and
smile sweetly at your victim; you become his friend after the terror does
its work. Now you reward the slavish submission with approval and validate
your victim's altered belief system as the truth, and give them new direction.
Police sometimes use this bad guy/good guy routine to break down a suspect
and obtain confessions.

Of course,
you can't terrorize people if you can't reach them. The point is, the
media must bear great responsibility for what has happened in America.
They are supposed to report the news, but not in a dis¬torted manner
that frightens people. I remember during the Second World War in England
the calm, mat¬ter-of-fact manner of the newscast¬ers. They told
us the most unpleasant truth with great dignity. They didn't try to panic
the British people as they reported the Nazis were overrunning France
and poised at our doors. On the contrary, the honesty and the dignity
with which the bad news was presented seemed to bolster British morale.
It made us all the more resolute to fight "the Jerries," as
we called them to make light of the matter.

We all
became more courageous and stronger in character thanks to the way the
news was handled. Even Adolph Hitler felt the British confidence—despite
the fact that we were close to defenseless thanks to liberal peacetime
disarmament, Adolph Hitler hesitated in invading England and made the
mistake of attacking the Soviets instead. He was afraid of the British
resolve. We out-intimidated him.

The
American media has not done so well; it has been used to instill fear
and break down resolve in many of us. Because of some mindless journalistic
policy, reporters have caused many young Americans to become severely
traumatized into feeling hostility and blame toward their own country.
Some bury their conflict with drugs or alcohol—a reaction sadly
indicative of the take-care-of-me socialist attitude.

This
implanted feeling for socialism is self-perpetuating because their lack
of productivity causes them to blame capitalism, like some people spend
their lives blaming parents for their unhappiness, never finally taking
responsibility for themselves. They have been prevented from functioning
as they should by media-generated feelings of hope-lessness and despair.

In recent
years, there has been developing in America a groundswell of sympathy
for the Soviets, as if somehow the collapse of the socialist republics
is really a renaissance of socialism ("with a human face").
The inevitable parallel attitudes are there too—a growing hatred
for leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan is now being
blamed for presiding over a decade of greed, not really surprising when
you realize that greed to the socialist mentality is synonymous with business—a
successful capitalist is a greedy capitalist. Behind that anti-business
prejudice is the inevitable "you-owe-me" attitude, thinly disguised
as ''you-owe-them'' charitableness. All this leads directly to discussions
of fair distribution of wealth, i.e., plundering the productive through
taxation supposedly meant to help the poor, while really creating more
bureaucracy and welfare dependency.

You
can see the implanted socialist identity becoming an electorate represented
by leftist American Congressmen who almost lost the arms race by voting
down the military budget in favor of social causes. For these politicians,
military strength equals "Rambo," profit equals greed, freedom
equals selfishness—while poverty is nobility, welfare is love, disarmament
is peace, and in general, socialism is fairness.

Patty
Hearst got her peace when she broke down in sympathy for the SLA. All
she needed was the smiling face of terrorist acceptance to validate her
new identity and give it a bank-robbing directive. The altered identity
always craves the nurturing, approval, and direction of those responsible
for the change in the victim's consciousness.

Most
Americans accept that, in a very real sense, liberty is a spirit, an identity
that can be communicated as it was in Eastern Europe. The spirit of '76
became the spirit of '89 from China to Czechoslovakia. This feeling, this
longing for freedom gets inside of people—it changes their attitudes.
Eastern Europe will never be the same. Ironically, the spirit of socialism
is here in America, with its own parasitic version of freedom. A police
officer recently told a friend of mine about a new reality in his rural
community. He said we are "growing monsters," kids whose entire
attitude is "sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll—and you owe me a job."

We have
almost won the Cold War. We have almost won the arms race. We have almost
won the peace. But alas, many Americans have been infected, implanted,
with the socialist spirit. Too many burn flags, hate free enterprise,
degrade the military, denigrate traditional American values, and all the
while, demand more and more social programs at the expense of defense.
They even call the Constitution an outdated document. Under the influence
of their changed loyalty, they accuse someone like Ronald Reagan of war-mongering—and
yet, see Castro, Ortega, or Gorbachev as their smiling, approving friend.

Intimidated
people can have a change of heart and turn against their own values, their
own families, their own country—in much the same way a child disobeys
his conscience under the influence of peer pressure. If Gorbachev were
up for vote in this country, there are many who would try to elect him.
So, during the next few years, if we start to see a renaissance of socialism,
"free-market" or otherwise, we will know what is at work. And
when we are told that perhaps there should be a blending of their system
and ours, it will be a good time to remember that if you have a clear
glass of water and another person has a muddy glass of water, mixing the
two is not compromise, it is capitulation.

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Time
will tell what is in store for the people who live under socialist tyranny
now. Mikhail Gorbachev may indeed be another Anwar Sadat, a leader who
has radically changed his thinking for the better. Or he may simply have
no other choice but to let go of the ill-gotten empire he leads. Or, he
may end up as just another Marxist/Leninist following the historical Communist
agenda of "retreat only to attack again." History will be the
judge of his deepest motivations. Either way, America is in danger of
creating her own political nightmare by submitting to the idealistic socialist
dream. Perhaps many of us have taken for granted what our forefathers
died for—the chance to be a free man or woman, to live and prosper
in a blessed land free of the misery, degradation, and forced servitude
that are the everyday reality of almost every other nation on the earth.

[To free yourself
from entanglement in the intimidator’s game, you must learn to deal
properly, without resentment, to pressures of any kind. My Be Still and
Know meditation exercise shows you how to do this and helps you practice
remaining in the proper state. You can try it before you buy it and, if
you like it, purchase your own copy, at fhu.com
or by calling 800-877-3227.]

Roy Masters—who
in his 80s continues to broadcast the longest-running counseling show
in talk radio history, his internationally syndicated daily radio program
Advice
Line, grew up in pre-WWII England. He started his journey toward
understanding human nature when as a teen he saw a stage hypnotist at
a vaudeville show in Brighton. The hypnotist easily put volunteer subjects
in a spell and made them do outlandish things, like dancing with a broom
and forgetting their own names.

Puzzled by the
hypnotist’s mysterious power, Roy distinctly remembers pondering
the question: “Why can’t hypnotism be used to make people
act sensibly, rather than foolishly?” Inspired by the idea of
harnessing this baffling force for good, he later pursued the art of
hypnotism and established a successful hypnotherapy practice.

After several years
of practice, Masters made his central and pivotal discovery about the
root of people’s emotional problems, addictions and complexes.
He realized that people did not need hypnosis, because their core problem
was that they are already hypnotized—not by a clever stage performer,
but by the stresses, pressures and seductions of daily life.

He used his knowledge
to discover a way to help us become de-hypnotized, and discovered that
the root of the power of negative suggestion lay in our wrong emotional
response, that of resentment. Masters’ remarkably effective exercise,
a simple observation technique called Be Still and Know—is at
the core of his unmatched track record in helping people overcome even
the most serious mental-emotional problems, and is the centerpiece of
a successful program within the U.S. military community (“Patriot
Outreach”) that is helping thousands of military personnel
and their families cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

With
the help of the hysterical press, the Cold War difficulties caused some
casualties on our side. We have a kind of Trojan Horse in our midst as
a result. The Soviet leadership counted on fear and ter¬ror—the
Stockholm Syndrome—to implant socialist sympathies in the hearts
of Americans for their cause.